France & New England

French spoken in New England over the centuries is a dialect related to Canadian French, but the culture is distinctive and concern over its existence was one reason for the documentary film Réveil This cinema study by Ben Levine examines the persecution of French Americans by the Ku Klux Klan, and the struggles to preserve a proud heritage in a monoculture America, and should be seen along with reading the books in this trilogy. One asset in that long struggle has been the American respect for the memory of the Marquis de Lafayette. His friendship with Washington and his exploits in the American Revolution are a permanent foundation for Franco-American ties. After his service in the American Revolution, Lafayette fell on hard days as the French Revolution involved him trying to prevent excesses and for his pains he was imprisoned for five years. Bonaparte obtained his freedom and he served until his death in the French Chamber of Deputies. As Lafayette neared the end of a notable life, in 1824, President James Monroe invited him to be the guest of the American nation in a gesture of thanks for his role in American independence. He accepted and visited New England in 1824, including New Haven and Providence, as well as Lexington, Concord, Salem, Marblehead, and Newburyport. In late August that year he was received in Boston with enormous excitement. He then toured all existing twenty-four states. On returning to Boston in June 1825 towards the end of his American travels, he laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument on June 17. After a final dinner with President John Quincy Adams in Washington, he sailed for to France on September 7. He died in 1834 and is buried in Paris under soil from the Bunker Hill battlefield. The series of which this title is part is a reminder of the friendship between the two countries that he so embodied, commemorated as well by the American Friends of Lafayette, the Massachusetts Lafayette Society, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the French Heritage Society. It is very much a living tradition. Eventually Union Bank merged with the State Street Trust Company, which had been established in 1891. In time the name was shortened to the State Street Corporation, which today is custodian for over six trillion dollars in assets. But it retains a clipper ship as its logo, and is still headquartered in Boston. Connections with the founding of the United States made the bank very conscious of its history, and it not only supported scholarly publications but actively collected prints, maps, hanging lanterns, even harpoons - becoming a historical museum about old Massachusetts. For many years, the prime mover in the bank's vigorous collecting was Allan Forbes, a scion of the celebrated Brahmin family of Forbes. Graduating from Harvard, he went to work for State Street in 1899 and became president in 1911, then chairman of the board until his death in 1955. He was eclectic in his antiquarian interests and even produced a highly useful study of clipper ships on sailing cards. If one asks why the head of a large financial concern would take time for such esoteria, perhaps it suffices to say he was a real Bostonian and a quote from Fortune Magazine in 1933 is apt: "The more or less romantic individuals who delight to discover in any community its sources of real power would find this whole Boston hierarchy - social, financial, and political - very little to their taste. At the top, but in another dimension altogether, are the Bostonians. Time cannot wither nor custom scale their infinite variety of sound investments. Social power is theirs. Civilization is theirs." Three volumes about France and New England are thus easily understood.